401–410 of 619 posts
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I don't think EA institutions argue that they have the One True Answer. They just often give recommendations - "eg. if you care about maximizing QALY overall, we recommend charities X, Y, and Z." If I don't care about QALY maximization, fine. But if I do, why would I not listen to the recommendations?
Longtermism and QALY do not seem compatible.
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Virtue ethics is dead as an ethos. The stated goal of practically all modern morality is good outcomes. This doesn't seem offhand implausible to me.
All modern moral systems have extremely serious defects where they can be gamed. Repugnant conclusion, the entire concept of deontology, etc. Virtue Ethics is ungameable.
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There's nothing substantive in this post, just unexplained opinions...
The main substantive point I made is: "No one has any idea how to create AGI now" Correct, no? The rest follows by basic logic. You can't craft solutions to problems you don't know anything about. You can't assign probabilities to outcomes without any information on the inputs or mechanisms of the system.
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"No one has any idea how to create X now" does not lead to "Imminent creation of X is very unlikely to be true". Right?
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You can always assign probabilities. I'll give you an example: say I'm a scary dictator and I ask you: "is A or B correct?" You have no idea what I mean by A or B, so you'd assign 50-50 if you had to bet something dear on the outcome of my totally unfair context-free question. Perhaps you happen to know of research showing that people more often set A as the correct answer in this sort of game, so you might assign 60-40, let's say. That's a probability estimate!!
Same principle for AI. You don't know much, but what you do know can still be used for a judgment. Supposing you do not believe in souls, then brains are just computers, then it's possible in principle for a computer to become sentient and intelligent, then it's just a matter of time 'til they do, whether it happens 10 years from now or 1000. Maybe you feel the human race will go extinct shortly, and that'll be another valid factor in your estimate of how much this is to worry about.
But either you accept that it CAN happen and discuss how many precautions to take today, or you're understandably unconcerned because it appears prima facie impossible to you. I imagine that for you to be unconcerned, you'd have to have judged that a being cannot create a being more intelligent than itself. (If you're using a different reasoning, please enlighten me)
But if that's your reasoning... what did evolution do? It has no brain, yet it created an intelligent being. And if you carve out a special clause for evolution-like processes, humans could still just simulate an accelerated evolution in a lab/computer and wait for a superintelligence to pop out. Does that not make sense?
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1) Why do we have a reason to believe there’s a cap to intelligence? 2) No, you don’t need to assume it happens via adding hardware 3) No, you don’t need to assume it can expand by itself 4) We’ve already seen people connecting AI systems to open internet and open internet to command and control of physical systems (cars, utilities, soon weapons systems) - turns out there was no convincing necessary 5) Nanobots also…
We are already made of nanobots, we are the nanobots, we are in intelligence, we are a general intelligence, and we are growing exponentially. AGI is here. AGI is you. You are an incredibly efficient piece of carbon thinkware able to sell for replicate into more carbon thinkware and that that extra carbon think where can go out and create its own life and make its own observations and spread information through the s…
Humans are deeply limited in their senses, their actions, and their ability to communicate. An AGI botnet installed on every computer/control system in the world would have none of those limitations.
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At this point I think that giving $5 to a homeless person in SF (even if they go straight to doing another shot) might be more productive than this self-aggrandizing vapid BS about some theoretical risk that might come in the future Right now what's threatening the most people is war, famine and diseases. Climate change is a tangible future threat but I'd bet a couple $ that the JSO organizers are full EA proponents…
> BS about some theoretical risk that might come in the future Like increased rate of hurricanes due to climate change? One does need to seriously consider low probability, high impact events, like pandemics, in one's future planning and resource allocation.
This is a bad analogy. The mechanisms and risks of climate change are reasonably well understood as are the solutions available to us now and even some possible future solutions.
When it comes to AGI, what's the risk? Something bad might happen? The mechanisms of AGI arising is also unknown since it has never happened before and it's not even known if it's possible. Finally, what's the solution? Prevent AGI research? Make sure every AGI project has a killswitch? How do you prevent something when you don't know if it is possible nor how it will arise?
Compare this to the concrete, measurable things we can do to slow down climate change and "AGI safety" seems like a make-work money pit.
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> Does the effectiveness of various forms of altruism actually form a total order? Given a moral compass, yes. EA is about not just looking at the immediate and the definite, the relative value of animals and humans is out of scope (though of course many individuals there will have opinions on it).
Maybe you can totally rank order goals or principles of morality within the confines of a single person, but how could you hope to do that for large groups of people without forcing everyone to assume the same things as you? Long-termism being a great example, because I personally, think the amount we should care about future people decays rapidly as we move into the future. It's not as if their lives don't have valu…
Not in my experience and all the time respectively.
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> If AGI has even a 1% chance of happening this century and those donations reduce the risk of it going wrong and killing everyone by 1% that's still money very well spent. I have yet to see anyone who argues this point show sufficient knowledge of the current state of AI research to credibly make it. If you live in the fantasy world where AI is just an arbitrary construct that can do whatever task by itself it is an…
How about a simple example - train a model on outputting code which: - scans open network ports through google dns - copies itself and the model to that location - whenever it detects a sigkill or file delete, scan again and save itself somewhere else Now you've got an autonomous virus that will never die. Add any other power-seeking and self-replicating strategies using AI modules - the task could be "generate code…
(Snark aside, I've realized this type of interactions have always resulted in a very low perception of EA for me. I don't come out of these conversations thinking "what a clueless thing to say by this person who also happened to support EA", I think "wow, EA is full with looney bins who don't know what they are talking about." If you are really into giving what you can and aren't sure why EA gets a bad rep, look no further.)
As an Effective Altruist I want to cure cancer, so I maximize my income by selling cigarettes to children outside playgrounds. The money will eventually be donated to the cause in my will, and in the meantime the prevalence of lung cancer in teens will incentivise the Free Market™ to find a cure. No need to thank me, really.
You jest, but that would absolutely make sense if you were a psychopath with the singular goal of finding a cure for cancer. Now use this same mindset but change the goal for something saner along the lines of "maximize healthy+happy lifespan for everyone", and then you won't sell cigarettes in playgrounds, since that harms the goal.
Okay, so then I fund pro-life groups to protect the lives/happiness of fetuses. And the EA activist down the street funds pro-choice groups to protect the lives/happiness of mothers. And we keep escalating such donations while having little net effect.
IMHO EA has more than a hint of authoritarian (or at least anti-democratic) tendencies. What gives some rich guy the right to decide what would maximize happiness for others? Why not just leave that money with the people who are best positioned to make those decisions for themselves my minimizing wealth inequality instead?
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> Either way: when your logic has established that you can obtain moral superiority by literally buying indulgences, it has officially proven too much, and if you can't recognize that, something has gone terribly wrong in your thinking. I see it as a natural outcome of consequentialism. Your ability to do good things is tied to your circumstances, which are not the same for everyone. Are you saying that you're certai…
The issue with the morality of indulgence isn’t that it recognizes that different circumstances allow for different outcomes, it’s that it allows for immoral behavior so long as the calculus works out. Evade your taxes, no problem if you gave more away to charities than you owed! Do a little light billion dollars fraud? So long as you saved the trillions of future humanity from an evil AI it’s fine. Sacrifice your ch…
What you're presenting are, for a consequentialist, the choices between two evils:
- do I pay taxes or give away to charities?
- do I do fraud or let evil AI go on a rampage?
- do I sacrifice my children or let the Romans kill us?
You can't argue for things that have no positive consequence: the child sacrifice sounds dumb to us because we see the alternatives as independent. If you only consider either/or choices, the number of things you can justify as a consequentialist becomes limited.
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Sorry, scientology? This comes off as pretty bad faith. Most EAs are people like me who read some essays, setup some recurring donations to GiveWell and call it a day. If that's how being a scientology member goes then it must be milder than I've been led to believe.
You describe all religions. Read some scripture, perform some simple devotions, and call it a day. I don’t mean to overstate the religiosity of EA but it’s not structurally different.